Tuesday, September 20, 2005

The Pirate Of Silicon Valley Says People Will Become Pirates

As reported by MacMinute:

Steve Jobs warns on digital music price hike

Apple CEO Steve Jobs has said the music industry is "greedy for considering a hike in the price of digital downloads, warning such a move would drive users back to piracy," reports Reuters. "If they want to raise the prices, it means that they are getting greedy," said Jobs at a news conference in Paris today. "If the price goes up, they (consumers) will go back to piracy and everybody loses," he said.

There's not much to add to that other than the fact that he is right. A lot of people who are buying songs from iTunes are doing so to support the format and business model iTunes offers ... not necessarily because that's what they want to do. Raising the price would be a middle finger to everyone who purchases Music ... and most would blame Apple because of their lack of understanding of the greed in the Music publishing industry.

The thing that irks me the most about this kind of news is that it costs the record companies NOTHING to have a song on iTunes ... while the estimated cost of a CD is $3.80 by the time it gets to the end user.